Plaid are an electronica duo loved the world over, a Warp Records staple who also have an avid love of videogames. They possess a sound quite unique to them and I put my hands up and admit that I am a massive Plaid fanboy. This is no fleeting love affair: I tried to work with them before on the sadly canned Lionhead / Jeff Minter project, Unity. I had the pleasure of producing on that title and Plaid were in discussions to write the music, so when we started to think of new artists for Chime they instantly leapt to mind.
The great irony of the original Chime was that although it was published for a good cause (by Martin de Ronde’s charity OneBigGame), the game itself felt vaguely inconsequential. Chime favoured an open-ended play style over the terse and insistent rhythm of its clearest inspiration, the music-puzzler Lumines. If you wanted to rack up multipliers, that was fine. If you preferred not to bother with the score, focusing rather on the meditative act of pushing squares to pretty beats, then that was fine too. Chime was neither here nor there.
Nonprofit game publisher OneBigGame has announced that it made a $100,000 profit in its first year of trading.
The firm says 96 per cent of that figure was donated equally to its two charity partners, Save The Children and Starlights Children Foundation.
The majority of OneBigGame’s revenues were driven by UK studio Zoë Mode’s musical puzzle game Chime, released last February on Xbox Live Arcade, with the developer working on the game pro bono.
